chimera

In the old land of Lycia roamed a creature that should not have been able to exist. The Chimera was three beasts stitched into one impossible body: a lion in front, a goat rising from its back, a serpent for a tail. It breathed fire, and it laid the countryside waste, burning fields and devouring flocks and herdsmen alike.

No ordinary weapon could stand against a thing you could not look at without flinching. Whole villages fled. The king of the land, at his wits' end, sent a young hero named Bellerophon to kill it, half hoping the task would kill the hero instead.

But Bellerophon had caught and tamed the winged horse Pegasus, and from the saddle he could do what no man on foot could. He rose into the air above the monster, beyond the reach of its flames and its claws, and struck from the sky. He had fixed a lump of lead to his spear; when he drove it into the Chimera's throat, the creature's own fiery breath melted the metal, and the molten lead ran down and killed it from the inside.

The monster died, but its strangeness outlived it. A lion, a goat, and a snake in one skin: nothing in nature is made that way. The Chimera became the very picture of the unnatural and the mismatched, a thing dreamed up out of parts that could never truly join.

From it we get chimera, which today means a wild fancy, an illusion, a hope so far-fetched it can never come true — the beautiful, monstrous, impossible thing that exists only in the imagination.